Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History

by Antonio Mendez

  At midnight Julio and I finally said good-bye, and as we walked out the door the houseguests gave a hearty “Argo!” salute to see us off. I paused before leaving. “You guys are going to do great tomorrow,” I said, looking at each of their six faces. “Just remember to go with the flow and have fun and you’ll be fine.”

  After Julio and I left, Lee and Joe stayed up drinking and talking. The scorched-earth policy had worked and by this time the only liquor left in the house was a bottle of Cointreau. Joe continued to stew about the plan and kept coming up with ways in which things could go wrong. He was concerned that because the Ministry of National Guidance was in charge of filming permits, they were going to simply pull everybody off the plane and hold them until they could confirm that the Argo story was true. Lee countered by telling him that the flight would be full of foreigners, and that the ministry didn’t open until nine in the morning—an hour and a half after our flight was scheduled to leave. “There is no way they are going to pull us off that flight and hold us for two hours.” Joe then returned to the problem of the yellow and white forms. Lee shook his head, getting frustrated. The Cointreau was working on him and he knew he should get to bed. “The bottom line,” he said before turning in, “is that I am going to get on that plane tomorrow. I hope you decide to make the trip, but if you don’t want to come then that’s your choice. But if you do come, then don’t screw it up for me and the others.”

  15

  THE ESCAPE

  The phone woke me at three o’clock the following morning.

  “It’s me, Richard,” said the voice on the other end. “I’m down in the lobby.”

  It was Richard Sewell, right on time. I showered and threw my few remaining things together and was down in the lobby in less than fifteen minutes. Sewell had come to pick me up in the ambassador’s Mercedes and drove carefully through the still sleeping town. The streets were dark and nearly deserted at that hour—both restful and alien—and by four thirty a.m. we had arrived at Mehrabad Airport.

  Sewell parked the car and the two of us proceeded through the initial security checkpoint without a problem. As I’d expected, the airport was relatively empty. There were only a couple of passengers in the hall and several airport personnel were slumped over dozing at their desks. Only a few Revolutionary Guards leaned against the counters, looking lonely and bored. I knew by late morning the scene would be completely different, with crowds of Iranians mobbing the controls and a larger force of Revolutionary Guards to keep them in line. This was one of the main reasons I’d picked this early departure time.

  I breezed through customs without incident. Richard had gone his own way; we were not necessarily planning on meeting up again, unless a problem presented itself. Richard had in his possession a diplomatic ID card that pretty much gave him run of the airport. At this point he was going to check with his contact at British Airways in case we needed a fallback plan. I then went over to the airline counters, where the Swissair clerk confirmed that our plane would arrive on time at five a.m. I pulled out a magazine and browsed the headlines while hanging around to wait for Julio and the rest.

  Meanwhile, back at the Sheardowns’, Roger Lucy was doing his best to get the houseguests up and moving. It wasn’t easy. The group had barely slept and several were suffering from hangovers. Cora recalls walking down the hallway and seeing Lee make a mad dash for the bathroom in his underwear. Lucy put on a pot of fresh coffee and everyone began the process of getting into character, putting the finishing touches on their disguises. Bob Anders had found a navy blue beret in one of the Sheardowns’ closets and added it to his getup. He checked out his appearance in the mirror and was pleased with the results. When it was time to leave, Lucy wished them well and herded them off into the waiting embassy van. Lee noted that Joe had decided to make the trip.

  As the van transited the city, the driver, an Iranian employee of the Canadian embassy, thought it was just another routine run to the airport. The houseguests were well aware of that fact and had to be guarded in what they said while in the van. Mostly they sat in silence. Mark remembers how peaceful, almost serene, the drive was. It felt comforting to be ensconced in the darkness of the van’s interior. He thought about how nice it would be if they could just drive, bundled together, all the way to Washington, D.C. Sitting next to him, Cora was going through a checklist in her head. She decided to search through her purse one last time for anything that might have her real name on it. She was surprised to come up with a receipt from the dry cleaners, and quickly stuffed it into the seat. The others were mentally going through their cover stories, reviewing the details, psyching themselves up.

  When the driver missed the correct turn for the Sheraton, Anders reminded him that they were supposed to pick up somebody at the hotel. The driver quickly backtracked and sped up so as not to lose time. Unflappable as always, Julio had spent the time waiting in the lobby reading the newspaper. He told me later how relieved he was when he saw the van pull up outside. By the time they got to Mehrabad it was a little after five a.m.

  Inside the terminal, I wandered over to a set of floor–to–ceiling windows near the main entrance and stopped where I knew I would be clearly visible from the outside. As nonchalantly as I could, I folded up my magazine and put it in my briefcase, pulled out the rather large Argo portfolio, and began flipping through it. As planned, I’d gone ahead and was signaling to the others that it was okay to enter the airport. The signal was for me to stand where they could see me, just on the other side of the windows, examining my portfolio.

  Outside, the houseguests sat waiting in the van. Because of the driver’s presence, they still could not talk freely. Julio kept his eyes on the windows, and when he saw me he turned to the others. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  The seven of them approached the national policemen standing outside the terminal and handed over their IDs. A cop flipped through them, noted their airline tickets, and waved everybody through. They looked good, confident, like world travelers on the move. One down, I thought.

  I walked across the airport to the check–in counters, where I could better observe Julio and the houseguests spill into the bright interior of Mehrabad. They seemed to be in good spirits but also a little overwhelmed. After all, they’d been at the Sheardowns’ for nearly ninety days and I knew it must feel strange to suddenly be surrounded by so many people. I marveled at Bob Anders, who sashayed through the doors carrying a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. He looked like a character out of a Fellini film. I hope he doesn’t overdo it, I thought, watching him smooth his hair in a gesture that seemed almost feminine. Despite the Canadians’ help, the houseguests had had some difficulty putting together luggage and appeared to a trained eye to be traveling a little light for a Hollywood location scouting party on an around-the-world trip.

  The trip through customs, however, went smoothly and they soon joined me at the check–in counter. As we came together for the first time in the airport I could see the corners of their eyes were ratcheted with tension and fatigue. Still, there was a good feeling of camaraderie. We were in this together and we were going to get through it together. We were a team. We were a location scouting party on our way to the next stop, then home to Hollywood. We were in the moment. They appeared to have listened to everything I had told them in our rehearsals. All right, I thought. They can do this.

  The plan I had briefed the houseguests on had one key element: stay together. In the event that anything should go wrong, this would give me the opportunity, as the production manager, to jump in with the Argo portfolio. Lee, however, had other ideas. Even more than Anders, I could see that Lee had embraced the adventurous spirit of the Argo mission. Back then, airlines had two lines for checking in: smoking and nonsmoking—it seems incredible, but back in 1980 it was still permissible to smoke on airplanes. Out of habit Lee had jumped into the much shorter nonsmoking line, while the rest of us were in the smoking line. This meant that by the time we got our board
ing passes, Lee had already checked in and was on his way to the immigration controls.

  When Lee reached the front of the line, we were still a little ways behind him. I noted that a uniformed officer, and not some untrained komiteh thug, was manning the controls, as I had warned them. I watched as Lee handed over his passport and yellow form. As a CIA officer with years of experience using alias documents, I can tell you that the first time you put one down on the immigration officer’s desk, there is always a little twinge. Here we go, I thought to myself. This is the moment of truth. Lee was playing it cool, but I knew inside his stomach must be cinching itself into knots. If anything was going to go wrong, it was most likely going to happen here. And now.

  The immigration officer studied Lee’s passport. “Is this your photo?” I could barely hear the officer ask. I cocked my head to hear Lee’s reply.

  “Of course,” Lee said. He was trying to remain calm, but I could see his nervousness was starting to show. A pair of scruffy Revolutionary Guards leaned against a nearby wall, looking on with a mixture of boredom and menace.

  The immigration officer left his post and quickly disappeared into a back room. Lee glanced back in our direction. We stood transfixed, our eyes glued on the door where the officer had disappeared. Had we missed something in Lee’s passport? Was the official looking for Lee’s matching white disembarkation sheet? The seconds dragged on until finally the officer returned. “It doesn’t look like you,” he said in heavily accented English. He showed Lee the photo, which had been taken several months before. In it, Lee had a bushy Yosemite Sam mustache that completely covered his upper lip. Realizing what the problem was, Lee pulled a serious expression to match the one in the photo, then used his fingers to mimic a pair of scissors clipping the ends of his mustache. “It’s shorter now,” he said.

  The immigration officer glanced at the photo, then back at Lee, and finally shrugged. With that, he stamped his passport and Lee disappeared into the departure lounge. I studied the houseguests and was happy to see that despite this close call, no one had panicked.

  The line inched forward, stalling occasionally as arguments broke out between the passengers and the immigration officer. Several Iranians were trying to travel on false documents, and one woman was pulled into secondary when she refused to cooperate. A few weeks earlier, Cora had read an article in the local paper about a woman who had been caught trying to smuggle money in her vagina. As she watched the woman being pulled from the line, she suddenly worried that the authorities might be subjecting random female passengers to full-body searches.

  When we finally got to the counter, everyone lined up to present their passports as a group. The immigration clerk, however, had mysteriously disappeared. We stood there for several minutes, doing nothing. Mark and Cora, who were at the front of our group, had a quick discussion about whether or not they should just walk past the checkpoint. They quickly realized it would be a bad idea. If they were caught trying to sneak past, it would only arouse suspicions that they had something to hide. Mark was confident enough in the quality of the documents and the plan to wait it out. After a few more minutes, the immigration officer returned to his desk, stirring a cup of tea. He scooped up our passports and without further delay gave us our exit stamps and waved us through. He also collected our yellow forms, and as he tamped their edges down on the counter, one of them floated onto the floor. As we walked past, I couldn’t resist, and I surreptitiously picked it up and stuck it in among my papers. It was Bob Anders’s form.

  Each one of us breathed a huge sigh of relief as we entered the departure lounge. Technically, we weren’t out of the woods yet, as there was still one final security checkpoint before we had to board the plane, but with immigration behind us, it felt like the worst had passed. A few Revolutionary Guards roamed about the lounge eyeing people suspiciously, but their interest seemed dulled by the early hour. We had about twenty minutes until our flight was called, so all we had to do was sit tight, keep our heads down, and wait it out.

  Lee and Bob paired off and wandered over in the direction of a row of seats. The lounge was about half full, but I knew it wouldn’t be long before it was jammed to the rafters. The two of them eyed a spot and then sat down, noticing as they did that sitting right across from them was Junior, the Canadian MP who had helped to house-sit after Roger Lucy had taken over for John Sheardown. With the embassy closing, the Canadians had been scheduled to fly out in two shifts, with several departing on early morning flights and the rest, including Ambassador Taylor, leaving in the afternoon. In fact, Laverna, Taylor’s secretary, was sitting right beside Junior. As soon as Lee sat down, Junior happened to see Lee’s bag, which was covered with Canadian maple leaf pins. After spotting the pins, Junior’s eyes then moved up from the bag until they rested on the beaming faces of Lee Schatz and Bob Anders. Junior took one look at the two Americans and did a double take. Laverna was just as surprised. She’d seen Anders at a few embassy functions in the past, but it took her a moment to realize that the bare-chested man wearing the flamboyant medallion and beret was the same as the buttoned–up senior diplomat she knew from before.

  Junior leaned forward. “What are you doing here?” he asked Lee.

  Lee didn’t hesitate. “Goin’ home, eh,” he said in his best Canadian accent. Junior was floored. He shook his head in amazement.

  While this was going on, I had gone to find Sewell, who was standing in the corner of the lounge with his friend from British Airways. The friend asked me why we hadn’t chosen to fly with them. “We would have given you the royal treatment,” he said. “First class, champagne, you name it.”

  “I appreciate that,” I said. I told him it was great knowing that we had a fallback in case something went wrong with the Swissair flight. It’s very rare to have an inside contact at the airport for an exfiltration and it definitely bolstered my confidence.

  I noticed that Joe and Kathy were over at the duty-free boutique but couldn’t see what they were doing. Then suddenly Kathy was tugging at my jacket and Joe approached me with a sealed bag from the duty-free shop. His mouth split into a wide grin as he handed it to me with a flourish, standing at attention as if he were presenting a trophy. “We would like you to have this as a token of our esteem,” he said somewhat formally.

  I found it a little bit awkward but it was heartfelt. It was clear they’d purchased a huge container of Iranian beluga caviar—I could see it through the plastic bag and could measure its heft. It was not inexpensive. It seemed like an odd moment, before we actually had “wheels up.” I felt that with this gift Joe was saying: “I’m with you on this plan, your plan, and I think we are going to make it out of here.” We were still “a mile from home,” as Jerome would say, and so it seemed a little premature, but the thought was genuine, especially coming from Joe, the reluctant warrior all along. It seemed that Joe had finally completed his own gut check and had found the confidence to push forward.

  It was at this moment that a voice announced over the intercom that Swissair Flight 363 was ready to board. The houseguests instantly leapt to their feet and I shepherded everyone toward the gate. We passed through the metal detectors and final security check without incident, and took our place in the tiny glassed–in room at the gate. Looking around, I could see that everyone was excited, barely holding it together. All that was left was to get on the tarmac bus. But before we knew it there came a second announcement over the PA system: “We are sorry to inform you that Swissair Flight 363 will be delayed due to mechanical problems.” It appeared that Murphy was not done with us yet. Our entire group formed a tight knot around me. “Everybody relax,” I told them. “This happens all the time. I’ll check this out and find out what kind of a mechanical problem it is, and what kind of a delay they are talking about.”

  We filed back into the departure lounge trying to stay upbeat. Once again I met with Richard and his British Airways contact to see what could be done. As it turns out, they’d already spoken with Swissai
r and found out that the problem was only a minor technical one. “It’s just a faulty air speed indicator. It should only take an hour to fix,” Sewell reported. The three of us then discussed the possibility of switching to a British Airways flight but decided in the end that it would probably only draw unnecessary attention. We had already checked our bags on Swissair and to switch would have meant pulling them off the plane and going through the process of checking them again.

  I met with the six and filled them in on what I’d learned from Richard. Everyone agreed it would be best to stick it out. “We just need to be patient,” I told them. Mark and Cora exchanged looks. “I know you are worried,” I said quietly to all of them, catching Joe and Kathy’s eyes as well. “You’d be crazy not to worry. But I’ve been here before. Mechanical problems happen all the time. This one is minor.” Bob Anders seemed to relax immediately. Lee, ever vigilant and vocal, was momentarily speechless.

  The wait became agonizing. Dawn had broken and the sky outside was just beginning to show a filtered gray light. Piles of snow were scattered around the tarmac like icebergs afloat on a steel gray sea. Inside the airport, the departure lounge was rapidly filling up with passengers as numerous flights began arriving from Europe and Asia. Several teams of Revolutionary Guards were now present in the lounge, moving among the passengers. Growing tired of picking on Iranians, they turned their attention to foreigners, addressing them rudely in broken English or German. It seemed almost like a sport to them.

  I wondered how long we could last before some overzealous komiteh member turned his attention toward one of us. I looked around to see how the houseguests were faring and was startled to see Joe reading a Farsi-language newspaper. I thought he had lost his mind—nobody would believe that a Hollywood producer would be able to read Farsi. It seemed that Joe had just had the same thought, though, and he suddenly put the newspaper down.